More than 1.7 million workers in New Jersey don’t have any guarantee under the state’s family leave law that they can return to their jobs after leaving temporarily to care for new children or sick family members, according to a newly updated Rutgers University study.
That’s because they don’t meet at least one of the law’s requirements for such job protections, which otherwise allow workers to take up to 12 weeks off, with a promise of returning to their positions. To qualify, someone must work for an employer for at least a year, work more than 1,000 hours over the year, and work either for a business with at least 30 employees or for a government entity.
Rebecca Logue-Conroy, the author of the study and a researcher at Rutgers’ Center for Women and Work, found that the people most likely to fall into one of the gaps are younger, female and low-income workers. People working in health care support, food preparation, education or at libraries were some of those least likely to be protected under the family leave law.
“Either they don’t work for the same employer, so they work for more than one employer over the course of the year, or they just haven’t worked for a full year yet, so they don’t qualify for the job protection, Logue-Conroy said. “Which means that they may fear losing their job if they use the family leave insurance that they have as a benefit.”
New Jersey workers with job protections can take up to 12 weeks off to care for or bond with a new child in the first year after birth, adoption or placement in foster care. They can also do so to care for an ill family member, or a child during a state of emergency, when their school may be closed. The law provides protections that overlap with those in the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which also includes provisions allowing someone to take time off for their own illness or disability.
In 2019, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed an expansion of the state’s separate paid leave law that increased the time a worker could collect benefits while away from their job and the amount they could collect. A worker can take up to 12 weeks and collect up to 85% of their salary per week, capped at $1,055 in 2024, if they take continuous leave. The benefit is capped at eight total weeks if they break up the time into shorter segments
Workers who contribute to New Jersey’s family leave insurance program through their paychecks are generally eligible to receive that compensation, but not all are guaranteed jobs when they return. Advocates say that means many people can’t afford to make use of the paid leave benefit at all.
The Rutgers study found that nearly 40% of the people who aren’t guaranteed job protections make less than $25,000 a year, though they made up just 17% of the employees studied. As incomes went up, the likelihood of being unprotected generally went down.
And 58% of the people who were unprotected were women, though women represented just under half of those studied.
“What we have is an expansive, inclusive paid leave benefit program that workers could lose their jobs for accessing,” NJ Time to Care has said about the program’s limitations. The coalition of advocacy groups, which is pushing for further protections under the law, took part in the study’s release.
In February, the state Assembly passed a bill to reduce the threshold for how large a company must be for it to be required to guarantee workers their jobs back — from 30 to five employees. But it’s not clear if the bill will advance in the state Senate, where it hasn’t made it to a committee hearing or vote.
Last year, state Senate President Nick Scutari, a Democratic from Union County, said he worried that “small businesses have a lot to be concerned about” the bill, NJ.com reported at the time.
The office of one of the prime sponsors, Assemblymember Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, said she wasn’t immediately available to speak on Friday. A call to the office of the other prime sponsor, Assemblymember Annette Quijano, hasn’t yet been returned.
The New Jersey Business and Industry Association opposes the law’s expansion to smaller businesses, saying they can’t easily afford to leave positions unfilled.
“Larger businesses are able to better provide coverage during a worker’s prolonged absence,” said Elissa Frank, the association’s vice president for government affairs. “Most smaller businesses are not financially equipped to bear the burden of increased employee absenteeism and will likely experience higher labor costs resulting from the retaining and training of substitute workers.”
She gave the example of a small business that asks an existing employee to step up and fill the shoes of someone on family leave, and then excels in the temporary role. If the employee on leave returns and finds that some of their responsibilities have changed as a result, Frank said, the business and employee could wind up in expensive litigation.
“What we’ve seen from speaking to a lot of our members is that it’s not that employers don’t want to provide job reinstatement,” they’re just worried about the complications, she said.
As proposed, the Assembly bill wouldn’t address other gaps in family leave coverage — those related to how long a person has been at a business and how many hours they’ve worked. The Rutgers report estimated more than 1.1 million workers, or about 27% of New Jersey’s workforce, don’t qualify for job protections because of those requirements.
Yarrow Willman-Cole, workplace justice program director at the New Jersey Citizen Action, which convenes the Time to Care Coalition, said her group would like to see people’s ability to return to their jobs guaranteed after just 90 days with a company, and without the requirement to work 1,000 hours over a year.
“What we experience in our work is that people … don’t understand the different sets of eligibility for job protection and paid leave,” Willman-Cole said.
Still, making smaller businesses guarantee employment for workers returning from family leave would put a dent in the number of people who aren’t currently covered by the law, the Rutgers report found.
The study used an example of reducing the threshold to 10 employees — rather than the five employees in the Assembly bill — since it drew from Census data that included details about businesses of that size.
If the business size threshold was reduced to 10 workers, another 300,000 people would be covered under the law, the report found.